


7.04: In Pathless Ways

by idlesuperstar



Series: The Crooked Roads [4]
Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-11-02
Packaged: 2018-04-29 14:09:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5130512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idlesuperstar/pseuds/idlesuperstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d promised to protect her, and all he brings her is this tangle of compromise and doubt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	7.04: In Pathless Ways

**Author's Note:**

> Series notes are [here](http://archiveofourown.org/series/136827). 
> 
> This is a sidelong look at ep 7:04 from Lucas' brainpan. If you've not seen the ep then it won't make much sense. Go and watch that instead. 
> 
> Title from William Blake's [ _Leave O Leave Me To My Sorrows_](https://www.poeticous.com/william-blake/leave-o-leave-me-to-my-sorrows) (which is a suitably/ridiculously emo title) from _An Island In The Moon_. Intertitles are Proverbs of Hell from [ _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_](http://www.bartleby.com/235/253.html).

It creeps up on him slowly, a dawning awareness as his breath plumes frostily in the cold morning dark. He is actually _enjoying_ his run. 

He grins briefly to himself, feet thudding steadily, nothing but the lights of London glimmering and the music swirling through his head. 

_Just for today, let go, slide away._

When - these last weeks - did this go from being the better way to escape his dreams, his restless insomnia, to something close to pleasure in itself? The pure, clean pleasure of well-used muscles, of things clicking into place, of his body behaving as he wants it to.

He has been mapping the city out in footprints over the weeks, trusting to memory - or more often luck - to bring him back to the familiar. Thinking, with a rebellious thrill, that if he gets lost then Harry will just have to deal with it. 

Feeling, with every tread, not the charter’d streets but the _freedom_. The space to breathe, to explore, to - to _choose_ to get lost, anonymous in this vast ancient city. 

He pounds along the path, each sharp lungful a welcome spark of pain, a tiny thrill of liberty.

All the myriad jolts of strangeness - the new shiny buildings, the disjoint of the Eye on the skyline, the million little changes that eight years have brought - fade into background chatter, almost comforting. 

Eight years is an eyeblink to London. 

It rolls on, unconcerned, growing and changing and never stopping. It _remains_. 

Lucas rests against the cold stone of the bridge, chest heaving. Pulls out his earphones. He gazes into the dark water, listening to the swirl and slosh, listening to his city breathing. 

Of the things he came back for, this is the easiest, the most satisfying. 

 

* * * * *

 

Lucas’  good humour holds until approximately four that afternoon, when some fucker sticks a stiletto into Beyda and leaves him to bleed out on the dirty station floor.

Lucas pockets the sim card with bloodied fingers, wipes his hand on his thigh. He can’t tell if it’s his blood or Beyda’s. 

The good thing about dark denim is that it never shows the stains.

 

* * * * *

 

The people they’re up against are never sweetness and light, but Khordad’s history with Six is particularly brutal. Lucas well knows how much torture someone can be put through before they die.

He shoves the twitch of memory away. There’s work to be done.

 

~

 

He feels it again, now, the thrum of the team working together. They’re focused, connected, buzzing. They may not yet know who’s behind this but they’ll fucking find out, Lucas is certain of it.

It settles into his bones, centring him. 

“Your money’s always on the Russians, Connie,”  Harry says dryly. Lucas hides a smile. 

Jo is the only voice of protest. She’s still - after everything - not had all her corners rubbed off. Lucas hopes she clings to her idealism for a while yet. Although it’s Connie’s matter-of-fact cynicism that he finds more reassuring. 

He’s well aware of how his world fractured into shades of grey a long time ago. He’s mostly come to terms with it.

And then Ros asks him to speak to Veta. 

 

* * * * *

 

_You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough._

 

Lucas watches her from the car, and wonders how many years it would take until he no longer recognised her walk, the swing of her hair.

Wonders if, thirty, forty years from now, she would still wrinkle her brow, still turn her head in this precise same way.

He knows this mood, this briskness; knows it’s not just the weather that makes her abrupt. It’s familiar and yet so far from anything he’s ever known with her. 

“It could have been you,”  she says, but there’s no warmth in it. She would show a stranger more compassion, he thinks. She shows more concern for Beyda’s health than his. 

Only when he asks her the favour does she crumble a little, show some of herself. It’s like a knife blade to his chest. 

He’d promised to protect her, and all he brings her is this tangle of compromise and doubt. 

He strokes her arm, uselessly. His hands are cold, he’s forgotten his gloves again.

“You’ll be fine,”  he says. It’s all he can give her. 

 

~

 

He can’t stand the idea of sitting in the car for hours while he waits for her. He’ll go mad. There’s a dog-eared A-Z in the glove box, and he finds he’s only a mile from Brompton Cemetery.

He turns his collar up and stuffs his hands in his pockets. It’s hardly a Russian winter, but the warm cocoon of the car has spoilt him.

Brompton is starkly beautiful with its wide avenues and ornate basilica. He could almost not be in London, except for the crowd of joggers who pass him, their accents unmistakeable.

There’s a still peace in between the occasional splash of voices. A strange comfort in the long-dead stones with their Victorian names. 

Eternal London, he thinks again. Rumbling on. 

 

Eventually when he’s chilled right through he finds a cafe - far too pretentious for his liking, with its ten different coffees and tea as an afterthought, but it’s warm and quiet and out of the way.

He sits clutching the too-hot cup in his frozen hands, focusing on the pain of the burn to quell his anxiety, the restlessness of waiting.

Some days he’s almost proud of how much pain he has learnt to bear. 

He waits for Veta to call.

 

* * * * *

 

“Can’t let them go in there,”  he says to Malcolm, anxiety prickling his skin. 

But Malcolm - calm, reliable Malcolm - reminds him of the thing that he still forgets too easily . 

None of them are alone. This is what a team is. He is surrounded by people who are _on his side._

Nobody’s been abandoned. 

Even so, Connie is tense beside him, beneath her usual steely calm. All they can do is wait. 

And then suddenly Ros is all action and they’re buzzing again, and the relief of having something to _do_ , rather than just impotent waiting, sings through his bloodstream like adrenaline. 

 

* * * * *

 

“We’re fighting blind,”  says Connie, never a ray of optimism, but she’s right. This is the terror of the modern world: anything can be a target. The old rules, the carefully ambiguous cold war game, the proscribed chess moves, they’re all out of the window in this brave new world.

And Khordad is not a chess player. He’s uncompromising. There is no negotiating in his world. No subtlety.

“Ninety-five minutes,”  says Ros, voicing all their unspoken worries. 

Harry is grim-faced. A child of five could read him today. 

And then Khordad is off the radar and Malcolm - calm, reliable Malcolm, - actually snaps at Ros. 

Lucas is almost relieved to get out of there. 

Almost. Veta is not going to be happy to see him again so soon.

 

* * * * *

 

She is not calmly indifferent now; the anxiety is sparking out of her, making her jaw tight and her words sharp.

“Because you don’t trust me,”  she spits, and Lucas would laugh if it wasn’t so totally inappropriate. Trust has nothing to do with it. He would give her the blood from his veins if it would help her, even though she wouldn’t want it. She’s too scared to see that everything he’s done has been to shelter her, to try and hack their way through the desperate mess Arkady has tangled them in.

“They’ll kill you. They’ll kill us both,”  she says, looking horribly young, and Christ, she is terrified. If he reached out to her now she would come to him, but they would both crumble. He can’t afford it. 

He clamps down on the fear rolling through him. He needs to set it aside, to clear his thoughts, to come up with an alternative. He needs space to think, away from her overflowing anxiety, from his worry for her.

Images skewer through him as he strides back to the car; all the ways he escaped the pain, the fear, through sheer willpower. 

He feels the ghost of Oleg’s breath on his neck. Feels the calm settle over him.

 

* * * * *

 

_If others had not been foolish, we should be so._

 

“Then it’s the Coventry dilemma all over again,”  Connie says, her flat calm cutting through the noise in Lucas’  head. His thoughts flash momentarily to those underground chambers, the utilitarian teacups and polished wood; miles away from this shiny future they work in but the same world, in the end. The same awful decisions to make. The same doubts. 

He thinks of dazzle ships, and Eddie Chapman, of a dead body stuffed with false papers. 

And then he knows what to do. He takes a deep breath, grits his teeth. It might just work.

All they have to do now is _find_ the fucking thing. 

 

* * * * *

 

“We cannot let the Russians have the advantage,”  Harry says. They’re all thinking it, of course. But of course Harry _has_ to be the one to say it. Lucas is glad he has a plan, because if things were different he thinks he might just punch Harry in the face. 

That would certainly break the tension in the room. 

“Of course there’s always a third way,”  he says. The combined stares of the others are almost a physical thing. 

 

* * * * *

 

Lucas has never been fond of undercover work, and the strain of putting a normal face on while herding the patrons out of the restaurant is the last thing he needs. Ros’  public servant smile looks almost as false as his feels. 

And then they’re alone and it’s so easy that he grins in relief. There must be something terribly wrong with them all, he thinks, that sarcasm in the face of immolation feels more normal than talking to ordinary folk. 

Two minutes to doomsday and then Malcolm, unpredictable genius that he is, says “Is there a microwave?”

Lucas would put his life in Malcolm’s hands daily, will happily follow his every order, but he thinks, briefly, as the seconds tick that if it does all go to hell, at least Veta will be safe. 

He wonders if Oleg would get the news, what he would feel.

This is not what he wants in his head, if these are his final moments. He concentrates on the devices.

_Well I’m a lucky man with fire in my hands._

The blast hits him like a body blow, throws him against the wall before dumping him on the ground, gasping for air. 

Everything is peaceful, suddenly. He lies on his back, cold seeping through his thin shirt, watching the grey clouds of debris billowing into the blue sky, and he can’t help laughing at the wonder of it all. 

After some time, Ros appears in his eyeline, coughing, grey with dust and unusually unkempt for her. She smiles at him, unfettered for once, and he grins back. She leans against the wall, hands in pockets, like she’s waiting for a bus, rather than an ambulance and hordes of coppers. Like he’s not lying on the ground in the middle of a January afternoon in his shirtsleeves, grinning like a lunatic. 

Fuck normal, he thinks. Fuck Khordad, fuck the FSB, fuck Harry, fuck shame and guilt and worry and blame. 

_Just for today, let go, slide away._

 

* * * * *

 

_The most sublime act is to set another before you._

 

Lucas thinks he should get fake blown up more often, if it means a day off and the look of almost-pride that had fleetingly crossed Harry’s face. 

He’s on his meandering way back to the flat, enjoying the leisurely walk in the crisp air after a morning in the more restorative regions of the V&A. He swings round when he hears her footsteps, can’t help the smile that breaks out at the sight of her. 

“We were lucky,”  he says, easily, sharing her relief, her unspoken gratitude. She is so like herself in this moment, open and familiar, unguarded, that he can’t help but draw her close. Her cheek is cold where he kisses her, but she smells the same, feels the same, and Christ he has missed this _so_ fucking much. 

“Please,”  she says, moving away, the ghost of her warmth already gone, and how can he stop her, when he can see she is breaking apart with it? When what he wants from her - that safety, that sense of home - is nothing he can give her in return, any more. 

He promised he would protect her. He can’t bring more danger to her. He has to leave unsaid all his wants, he has to watch her walk away. He feels hollow with the unfairness of it all, trembling with impotent rage. 

 

He stands watching until she has disappeared from view, and then turns on his heel, retracing his steps. He needs to get lost in the clatter and bustle of the city, of the people noisily going about their lives, happily ignorant of the Khordads among them. 

Needs to disappear for a while in the daytime crowds, until he can pound out his jagged anger on the empty dark streets of the city, and hope that London will fold around him; steady, imperturbable, eternal.

 

* * * * *

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Endless gifs of Lucas striding purposefully with his thighs to the delightful [playazindaback](http://playazindaback.tumblr.com) and [jennytheshipper](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennytheshipper/pseuds/Jennytheshipper) for their eagle eyes and brainpans. The overdueness of this fic is entirely my fault. Thanks to everyone who's stuck with me, it's ridiculously heartwarming. 
> 
> Also, this turned out to be Gen (whut?) which surprised me, but sometimes you know, that happens. playazindaback said _at first I was disappointed there was no smut_ and I was all _ME TOOOO_
> 
> While daydreaming stupidly elaborate backstory timelines for Lucas re everything I spent far too long making mental playlists and deciding what his favourite bands were. I won't thrust these upon you, dear readers, but safe to say I've listened to more of The Verve these last few weeks than the last decade. I think Lucas would love the new magic of digital music/mp3 players. I also think he'd dig out all the old albums that have happy or easier associations, and so he'd be trawling through his nineties albums, reliving his youth. 
> 
> My fave bit of this ep (apart from the MICROWAVE BANTER, of course) is Connie telling Lucas about the Coventry dilemma, for the story itself, and for it leading Lucas to find a way out. These days I'm fascinated by WW2 SOE and propaganda stuff, and I don't think it's a push to have Lucas know some. [ Dazzle ships,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage) [Eddie Chapman,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman) and [Operation Mincemeat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat) are all fascinating. Check out [Ben Macintyre's ](http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/ben-macintyre) books if you're interested, they're ace. And you can visit the [Churchill War Rooms ](http://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms) in London, which are also bloody great.


End file.
